New Years trip to London

We headed down to London for just over a week to see the city again and bring in the New Year. And what a trip! Not only did we celebrate the New Year, but we saw a great show, were tourists (again!), caught up with friends, and got engaged!

Yes, that's right, Matt asked me to marry him just after we had just finished our first bottle of Moet and celebrated the New Year. I promptly accepted and we continued to celebrate the night away. The following day we went engagement ring shopping together and went for a walk through Hyde Park and when we reached the banks of the river Matt slid the ring on my finger and our engagement was official. It was great to be able to celebrate with our good friends Bronwyn and Kimmi :)

We also took in our first London show - Avenue Q. Not exactly the most traditional or classical musical, but it was hilarious and quite worth the effort of dealing with crowds and windy weather. It's a musical that has a familiar look and feel to that of Sesame Street with it's very own crass and potty-mouthed muppets. With songs titled, "Everyone's a little bit racist" and "The internet is for porn" how could it not be brilliant?! Anyway we loved it.

We visited the Tower of London and the ice-skating rink. However we didn't get a chance to go into the Tower or onto the rink due to the very expensive rates and crowds everywhere! Although as the sun was almost out and the wind wasn't too wild, we took some time to walk over the Tower Bridge and down to the HMS Belfast. It was a lovely walk and we also got to see the bridge raise to let some ships come through. Excitment! LOL

I also caught up with a friend of mine from back home; Meg - it was great to see another familiar face and to catch up on her travels. Bronwyn, Kimmi, Matt and I also ventured into the rainy cold to devour delish sushi and tempura vegies and drink sweet sweet plum wine. It was such a great Japanese restaurant, not too expensive and very authentic, we were impressed with our find (thanks to Joe!).

So once again another trip to London came to an end, however we did manage to start plans for a potential skiing trip to France and St. Patrick's day trip to Dublin - we'll see though!

Hope everyone had a great New Years and all the best to all for 2008.

Our first [non] white Christmas

So even though it didn't snow we still had a great Christmas, all cosy and warm, in Newmarket. We slept in (cause there was no sunlight coming through the windows to wake us up bright and early unlike back home when you can't sleep past 5am!), opened all our lovely presents, and planned lunch. Like all good roasts though, it ended up taking two hours more than we had originally estimated, but it was worth it cause we were famished by then! And it was pretty much the best roast turkey Christmas we've had, if we don't say so ourselves, we were quite chuffed! And UK tele on Christmas day pretty much rocks as well!

Boxng day was spent like every other Boxing day - getting over Christmas lunch and lounging around not doing too much. Except I've gone through two boxes of tissues as I've managed to pick up a head cold and a sniffly nose, ugh! Matt was on the computer playing his new game and I had set myself up a wee bed on the couch and watched our new Friends DVDs - isn't that what you do when you're sick? :)

We head down to London at the end of the week for New Years and hopefully we'll get in a show, some ice skating and some more sight-seeing.

So I hope that you all had a happy Christmas and have a great New Years. And thanks to those who sent us Christmas cards and presents, we feel very loved! xx

Newbies in Newmarket

So we've been in Newmarket (our new home away from home for the next couple of months) for about 2 weeks and so far we're loving it. Such a nice sleepy hollow of a town with a high street of shops and pubs and a Christmas fair as well!

We're about a 15 minute walk from the high street which is handy and so far we haven't had to deal with any bad weather (bit chilly, but no horrible rain or snow...yet). We're enjoying not doing too much of anything and catching up on sleep from our 3 months of traveling.

Our plan is to base ourselves in Newmarket and find some work either in the town or in surrounding areas such as Cambridge or Bury St Edmunds. They're both quite a bit bigger than Newmarket and only a 20 minute bus ride away. So far I've applied for three jobs, so just waiting and seeing. Matt's gotten a hair cut (LOL).

Hopefully we'll get a chance to travel a wee bit in the next couple of weeks, on our list are: Edinburgh, Leeds, and Cardiff, but we'll have to wait and see. We're also only a 2 hour train ride away from London so we'll be going down there as well I imagine.

We haven't taken too many photos of the town but we'll upload some as soon as we do.

Getting round about in Milton Keynes

When we arrived in Milton Keynes it was pitch black (and only 5:00pm!) so we didn't get to see much of the city, but we did get to go through about 20 roundabouts on the way to my Aunt Irene and Uncle Charles's place. The city, if you haven't heard already, is based on American town planning so has a lot of roundabouts, hardly any traffic lights, and the roads are build in a repetitive grid shape. Although this sounds boring, it was far from it. All the roads are lined with trees (and if it weren't winter I'm sure it would have been gorgeous!) and there are pedestrian and bike ways throughout the city so that you would never have to be on a main road if you didn't want to be.

Unfortunately we were only staying for the weekend, so we tried to make the most of it by doing a bit of road trip out to Oxford. On the way we stopped into the Xscape Centre that houses a massive indoor ski slope and wind tunnel for indoor sky diving. Very impressive for both Matt and I as we've never skied nor sky dived (although we didn't attempt either of them there and then, maybe on our next trip!).

After our eventful search for a car park in Oxford we wondered round the town and visited the Christ Church which was quite impressive, even in the dreary day. We walked down to the river and were lucky enough to see a bit of rowing race going on. The guys looked freezing gliding fast through the water.




We then decided to take in a bit of a late lunch in a wee cafe where I recognised our waitress. Although I just couldn't figure out how I knew her. Charles couldn't help himself, so asked her and it turned out, after lots of 'do you know such and such' and 'have you been to such and such' we figured out that we'd met at Oktoberfest in Munich. No wonder we didn't know straight away, we'd obviously had too many steins. Small world though, eh?

On our second day Irene and I sent the Matt and Charles to Bletchley Park - where they did a tour of the museum and grounds where the Enigma code was broken during the war - while we went shopping. And the shopping centre and Milton Keynes was very grand - again everything is in a grid shape but there are lots and lots and lots of shops. I would have been happy to spend the day there!

In the afternoon we left Milton Keynes and took a drive to Newmarket to visit my Aunt Isabel and settle ourselves into her wee house, which we'll be house sitting while she's out in Australia.

Beers, beers, beers, and a bit of sightseeing, in Belfast

Our trip to Belfast went very quickly indeed, even though we were there for over a week - the longest we've stayed in once place on our trip to date. It was great to catch up with the Montgomery side of the family and again Matt got to meet lots of new people. I told him that by the time we left Belfast he would have met nearly half of my family! LOL

In a nutshell our time in Belfast consisted of lots of pub visits thanks to Brian and Louise, my Granny's birthday dinner, a trip up the coast to the Giants Causeway and Bushmills Distillery with Carly, lots of tourist activities including a open top double decker bus trip around the city (which was freezing!), a "fiddle de dee session", and our very first pasty bap experience! Phew, no wonder we were exhausted by the time we left! And I got to meet another of my newest second cousins, Saria, gorgeous!

The weather was definitely changing when we we were in Belfast, starting to get very cold and a bit windy! I left Belfast with more gloves and more bed socks (thanks Louise and Carly!) to keep me warm.

We were very impressed with the open top double decker bus tour we did of the city - the best tour of a city we've done on our trip so far. We visited the shipping docks where the Titanic was built, the Cathedral district, the 'trouble areas' which included the Shankle and the Falls roads (lots and lots of murals), the University area and lots more. We've since learnt that tourism in Belfast has grown over the past 5 years because the troubles are easing and we definitely didn't feel like we were in any danger when we were there. And we did spend some time by ourselves of a night time in the city. Lots of development going on in the city, which is great for it's economy and tourism - so people get out to Belfast if you can, it's worth a trip!

Our road trip up to the Giants Causeway and the Bushmills Distillery was another highlight. Although the day was a bit dreary we still got some great coastal and mainland views. We got out and walked to the Causway (the remains of an old volcano, very impressive) which at first I was dubious about because it was freezing!! So much so that Carly and I hand to tie our scarves round our heads, we looked like right eejits! But it was worth it in the end for the magnificent views. We then drove about 10 minutes further for some lunch and a visit to the Busmills Distillery. The tour was quite interesting but I have to say that it wasn't the tastiest of whiskies...shame really cause the tour was so good that by the end of it we were all looking forward to a whiskey (even though I don't drink it at all!).

We spent quite a bit of time seeing the inside of old school Irish pubs as well thanks to Brian and Louise. We visited the oldest tavern in Belfast, Whites Tavern, we also visited the Duke of York (down a wee alley way, wouldn't have know it was there if Brian didn't take us), the Crown with lovely old style booths where you buzzed for the waitress (tre cool!) and Fibber McGees where we experienced our first Irish "fiddle de dee session" - Matt liked it so much that he bought their CD; he claimed he was supporting local talent, I think he'd just had too many Harps! LOL. We also managed to see some more stylish modern bars, but by far the old school pubs were our favourite.

Oh my gosh, I nearly forgot, we also caught a Karaoke Kab home one night. Now Brisbane could definitely do with one of these bad boys! A mini cab with microphones and karaoke screens installed so that you can sing your way home; the cabbie even gets into the spirit of it. It was pretty much the best thing ever! And by the time we'd left the pub, had our cheesy fries and kebabs, we were in serious karaoke mode. Hilarious!

So all up a busy and very eventful trip to Belfast - we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves! We then hopped on a wee plane to Stansted and then onto a bus where we arrived safe and sound in Milton Keynes.

Island living in Guernsey

We've really enjoyed our wee trip to wee Guernsey! It was great catching up with (and in Matt's case meeting) the Guernsey Parkers and Stevens' and Griffiths'! We've done so much as well over the last 5 days - gone on cliff walks and bike rides and celebrated birthdays and our first Guy Fawkes night - we're almost tired out!

Oh and one of the most exciting things happened to us - we had our first encounter with a famous person! Tony Robinson was on our flight from London and I saw him when we boarded but somehow Matt missed him (well he is pretty tiny). But when we got off the plane, I ducked into the bathroom and when I came out Matt was sat there one seat away from him. And it turns out he'd had a nice chat to him while I was in the bathroom because the airline had gone and lost our luggage - Matt and mine and Tony's (we're on a first name basis now!) and his partner's luggage didn't arrive from Gatwick. So we rubbed shoulders with famous people while filling in lost luggage forms. Unfortunately I didn't get in a "I have a cunning plan" line. Our bags did show up in the end though.

So what a start to our trip, hey! The next big event was meeting my little second cousin Gracie which happened the following day - oh *and* of course seeing my cousin Lisa and and her husband Jamie again :) Gracie is such the cutest and most chilled out baby I know! I tried to get her to say Stormy, but she just can't..yet!

The big party for my cousin Lyndsey's 30th was that night as well - such an awesome party. There were wigs, there was gambling, there was sing star, what more could you want!?! Matt and I didn't win anything in the blackjack or roulette unfortunately, but it was such a great night!

We spent the majority of the rest of our time in bikes as the weather was pretty perfect. And we managed to fit in a cliff walk that had some fantastic scenery. Oh *and* we went to our first Bonfire Night (for Guy Fawkes night) which was pretty impressive as well - tell you what though I've never been so close to fireworks before; I was a bit of a wuss and a bit scared! But it was good to watch while sampling some of the local fare - bean jar. Matt loved it.

So a great trip to Guernsey all round! Tomorrow we head to see my Mum's side of the family in Belfast via Manchester - just had a look at our ticket and we spend more time in the airports than we do on the planes...gosh!